So maybe I should just start with a weekly Top 100, or maybe a Top 50, and a list of 50 blogs that aren’t ‘dead’ but that are near the bottom of the poll.

This would hopefully generate a weekly buzz or something like that. In addition, I can publish individual blog ranks in the blog profiles - again theses would be updated weekly with the charts.

Monthly roundups may still be interesting too, as would regional charts.

I’ve also been thinking about ways for members to vote for other blogs. I usually see this as a pointless exercise, but it is something that has been requested. I could include in this a method for people to easily report inappropriate members.

I’ve got a load of new features (not related to the charts) that I want to do, so perhaps I’ll make a post about these in a week or so.

Just got to find some spare time now…

Rather than a seven day rolling average, I actually meant picking a “chart day” (Sunday? - like the chart show on radio one) to generate some buzz - once a week the chart would change and people would talk about it as it was an event.

I do take your point about spikes being meaningful and interesting tho.

How about also displaying other data as well as their chart position - the traffic figures from your counter are relevant as they show how close blogs are to each other (or not), even if the it’s not consitant with other counters - but how about things like their technorati link data? (Technorati have an API) - you could then rank british blogs by other criteria as well as traffic (which may actually be more meaningful).

I should imagine that most folks realise that different counters give different readings, I’ve got two trackers (for a giggle) and my hosting stats, and they are all different.

I figure that an RSS tracker, while only picking up the HTML browser types, would still give the same percentage across the board of all the blogs. But then I don’t have the foggiest idea how to alter my RSS feed anyway…

Regional scores would be an interesting feature too - thanks. I’ll look into the possibilities there. Re. the ad revenues, they’re struggling at the moment!

Tom, I think a larger Top X chart is the way forward! The RSS feed tracker would only work with HTML compatible readers, and may be a bit quirky. It’s an interesting idea though, and I shall look into it.

I am working with perlworld to build a bot to keep an eye on all member sites. Among other things, we are hoping that we can detect when blogs were last updated, and hence detect real dead blogs. Do you think this is a better solution?

How about a tracker graphic that can go into RSS feeds? If your blog doesn’t have an RSS feed then it would appear that you get more traffic than a site that gets most of it’s readers via RSS. There are plenty of RSS readers that use a browser to display the feed, so a tracking graphic should work like the page graphic you use at the moment.

Perhaps the ‘Bottom 10′ should only be included if there has been an update in the last week, although that will be harder to track it would at least remove from the list ‘dead blogs’.

Actually, it’d be a nice way to remove dead blogs automatically from the list (otherwise the database will just keep growing full of orphaned blogs).

Just my tuppence worth…

I agree that a weekly chart would be better than a daily chart. It won’t make a difference to chart positions if the score is a seven day average or a seven day total.

Why just a top ten? Ten’s a small number and many people will have reasonable traffic, but knowing a top ten position’s a tall order won’t bother. A top 100 would make a chart position relatively attainable and so attract more participants.

Charts for Scotland, Wales, NI, the ex-pats and the English regions would be good; the more prizes you give out (and the easier it is to get some sort of ranking) the more people will join in.

And thanks again for all your work — may your ad revenues rise enough to make it worthwhile.

Just thinking aloud here, it would mean new blogs would need to wait seven days before any real results could be calculated. This probably isn’t a good thing. Further, don’t you think it’s interesting to see daily spikes? Sometimes folk will bung something on their site that appeals to a load of others, and their traffic will spike. I don’t think we should try and hide these events.

Having said all that, it could provide an interesting view on the data. Thanks for the suggestion!

Just my 2 pennies - thanks for doing this by the way!